The German government has responded to the next big challenge in its energy transition -- storing the output from the solar boom it has created -- by doing exactly what it has successfully done to date: greasing the wheels of finance to bring down the cost of new technology.

Over the past five years, Germany has been largely responsible for priming an 80 percent fall in the price of solar modules. Now it is looking at bringing down the cost of the next piece in the puzzle of its energy transition: battery storage.

The price of solar photovoltaic cells has dropped 99% in the past quarter century. So in an increasing number of markets around the country, solar is at or very close to grid parity.

Consider Colorado. The Denver Business Journal reported last month the results of months-long competitive bidding process:

Xcel Energy Inc. is proposing to triple the amount of utility-scale solar power on its grid in Colorado, and add another 450 megawatts of wind power….

If approved, the plan would cut Xcel’s carbon dioxide emissions by more than one-third compared to 2005 levels.

makes me feel optimistic for the future of alt energy, rather prescient as I firmly believed this (price reduction through economy of scale) would be the trend quite some time ago, and disappointed it had to be Germany to drive the process since the US couldn't be arsed. I now predict they will be opening some 1001 Funniest American Jokes thrads any time now.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

I have a simple solution to the problems of carbon emissions, increasing energy demands, declining fossil fuels, unemployment and obesity.

Treadmills!

Yes, treadmills, lots and lots of them. Also exercycles, eliptical machines, etc. all of them hooked up to generators. Burn fat not oil. Put the unemployed to work generating electricity. Human powered electrical generation is the ultimate in renewable resources. High school and college students having trouble finding summer jobs? Not anymore, just go down to the local fitness center/community power plant and sign on for a summer long workout. Old folks bored silly at the nursing home? No problem, just hook the physical therapy unit into the grid. Workers get paid by the kilowatt, not by the hour and they enjoy increased health benefits. Peak demand meets peak performance. It is a win/win scenario. Stop being a part of the problem and become a part of the solution.

__________________Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.

I say that all floors, sidewalks, and roadways should have piezoelectric crystals installed under them that would generate electrical as we move about, plus everyone should wear backpack inertia-generators to charge one's own computers and smartphones. These are technologies we already have.

__________________Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields

The battery was designed, built, and tested in the laboratory of Michael J. Aziz, Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Roy G. Gordon, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, led the work on the synthesis and chemical screening of molecules. Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, used his pioneering high-throughput molecular screening methods to calculate the properties of more than 10,000 quinone molecules in search of the best candidates for the battery.

Quote:

By the end of the three-year development period, Connecticut-based Sustainable Innovations, LLC, a collaborator on the project, expects to deploy demonstration versions of the organic flow battery contained in a unit the size of a horse trailer. The portable, scaled-up storage system could be hooked up to solar panels on the roof of a commercial building, and electricity from the solar panels could either directly supply the needs of the building or go into storage and come out of storage when there’s a need. Sustainable Innovations anticipates playing a key role in the product’s commercialization by leveraging its ultra-low cost electrochemical cell design and system architecture already under development for energy storage applications.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

I say that all floors, sidewalks, and roadways should have piezoelectric crystals installed under them that would generate electrical as we move about, plus everyone should wear backpack inertia-generators to charge one's own computers and smartphones. These are technologies we already have.

In my house we use socks and carpet.

__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.

1. Using salt to keep producing solar power even when the sun goes down.
2. Electric vehicle batteries that can also power buildings.
3. The next generation of wind turbines is a gamechanger.
4. Solar electricity hits grid parity with coal.
5. Advancing renewable energy from ocean waves.
6. Harnessing ocean waves to produce fresh water.
7. Ultra-thin solar cells that break efficiency records.
8. Batteries that are safer, lighter, and store more power.
9. New age offshore wind turbines that float.
10. Cutting electricity bills with direct current power.
11. Commercial production of clean energy from plant waste is finally here.
12. Innovative financing bringing clean energy to more people.
13. Wind power is now competitive with fossil fuels.

It's good that renewable energy is starting to win in economics, because that's been a common objection to renewable-energy development. The fossil-fuel groupies may eventually have to go off the grid and get their electricity from home-sized diesel generators.

There's an article in the Financial Times about the ITER fusion reactor in France. The link wants you to sign up. Anyway, they are pouring a lot of concrete for the actual reactor ring. It's to be lined with titanium and beryllium, instead of carbon. That's a design change.

The article said that experiments are scheduled to begin in 2020 but it won't be fueled with deuterium and tritium until 2027. It said a lot of other things too but those are the main points I remember.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

Here's another fusion article about a new record energization. It was last fall at a Chinese tokamak (toroidal reaction chamber shape) reactor. 30 seconds. I find that encouraging, in comparison to the much shorter blips I've heard of before. Thirty seconds seems like a lot more opportunity for destructive heat transfer than a mere second or so. I'm now personally much more hopeful that the problem will ultimately be solved, but unsure of what the timeline might be. It will be a signal achievement when it arrives. One side benefit would be that the by-product is helium, an element that is in critically short supply! The problem of net energy loss still exists, but one step at a time, I suppose. No one ever said it would be easy.

The promise of fusion is immense. Its fuel is hydrogen plasma, made from the most abundant atom in the Universe, and the major byproduct is helium, an inert gas. In this era with the threat of climate change, clean alternative sources of energy are more necessary than ever. However, even after decades of research and enormous investments of money, scientists haven't succeeded in producing a working nuclear fusion plant. Nevertheless, many feel the potential payoff is worth continued investment.

Now the exciting part -

Quote:

Researchers at the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) in Hefei, China, achieved a significant improvement in its confinement time and the density of the plasma it held. This step is necessary to maintain the appropriate conditions for fusion as well as to reduce the damage the hot plasma causes to the reactor walls. As described by J. Li and colleagues, the latest run at EAST achieved a plasma pulse lasting over 30 seconds, a record achievement that simultaneously demonstrated improvements in heat dispersal.

So, another step closer to harnessing a little ring of starfire in a machine on earth.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

I've worked at enough plants that the ash pond would be the last thing I'd worry about. One plant sold their fly-ash to make high grade concrete. Mix fly ash in instead of sand and the ash makes dense concrete that is harder and more resistant to salt, chemicals, and cracking.

__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.

Forbes gets it right! Yes, you heard me right. Forbes. Why is solar so much cheaper to install in Germany? Because they are systemically efficient, where we are systemically inefficient. Can we streamline the freaking process, please? Can we?

Prices have plummeted so much over the past two years that the solar panels and associated supplies cost about $8,000 for a typical 4,000-watt residential system. A qualified solar specialist or electrician should be able to install these panels for about $2,000 given that it’s only about a day of work. The total installed price should be about $10,000, without any tax credits or incentives. That is about the price of a comparable system in Germany.

But the average price of a residential system in the U.S. is about $20,000. So where does the extra $10,000 go? I can assure you that it is not the result of greedy installers, paranoid utilities or greater German installation efficiency.

Studies by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and by the University of California, Berkeley both confirm that these higher prices are almost exclusively related to the paperwork it takes to “officially” install a standard rooftop system in the U.S. That’s right, government red tape -‐ local, state and federal.

Coal is the biggest problem wrt CO2 emission, and it's what we need to tackle first. We have the means. We aren't going to run out of coal anytime soon, so we need the antidote to be economically feasible so we can stop using coal as soon as possible, and despite its short comings, solar fits the bill. If we were spending on solar system storage batteries the capital we currently evaporate to non-productive, even counterproductive busy work, that in itself would give better economic utility returns.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

I've been hoping that by the time I need a new roof on my house, solar shingles will have come down in price. I purposefully planted my trees away from the house so they would shade the sides of the house but wouldn't block the roof top. And the trees drop their leaves to let sun through in the winter at lower incidence angles.

The added benefit is when a tornado came by and blew a tree down in our backyard, it missed the house.

Since I design, build, optimize and run power plants, having a personal power plant would be sweet. At least one bigger than the miniatures I build with the kids. I be futzing around with my plant all the time, tracking it on the computer. I'd Get some t-shirts, hard hats, and stuff made and make myself the plant manager.

__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.

Studies by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and by the University of California, Berkeley both confirm that these higher prices are almost exclusively related to the paperwork it takes to “officially” install a standard rooftop system in the U.S. That’s right, government red tape -‐ local, state and federal.

Naturally I looked at the graphic before reading your quote, because a picture is worth 750 words even after federal, state and local taxes. And it didn't say red tape to me, it said free market gouging.

OK, the larger absolute declared profit could still be the same relative profit, but the vastly larger "labor" cost and the infinitely larger "supply chain" cost are somebody creaming off money.

The "permitting" chunk and the sales tax are red tape, sure. That's at most $1500 of the $10000 difference.

"Overhead" is meaningless unless we know that it's government overhead not companies' so-called overhead. And wtf is "customer acq"? Customer acquisition is sales, isn't it? Another bucket to hide profits in.

You are right, Mr. Joe, and I am wrong. I did some more Google Fu after posting, and found this. I believe what they refer to in this piece as "value based blah blah" is code for price gouging? They make other seemingly plausible points that help to explain the difference. So agreed, predictably Forbes was all, eww eww it's the government, it's the government! Even so, I'm still all for getting rid of any useless paperwork shuffling that essentially adds cost and complexity for no particular gain. Getting solar should be easy, not hard.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

Part of the "value based pricing" is positive government promotion in Germany, leading to a "more robust value proposition". Whereas in the US (and the UK) no one's really sure what future governments are going to say so you have to price in more risk now. That's what they're saying anyway. Really ... just excuses for less competition and more price-fixing.

I've done some rough checking of cost for my home use. My peak electric use is 1000 kWh, for two months in summer. Average is about 475 kWh. If I wanted to produce 100% of peak use, it would require about 9kW of panels. Cost, rounded up, is about $60K. With subsidies, payback period would not be very long. If I could get the same system for $30K, it would probably pay back without subsidy at all, since I could heat with the excess in winter and sell excess in spring and fall. It would take a long time, but it would also add value to the home. I would consider it like any other home improvement, with an eye to eventual resale value. Hopefully US consumers start asking the question, yo dude, why so high?

PS - Not that I can do any of that. Well, still fighting with the HOA. Sort of fighting. Almost giving up.

__________________Chained out, like a sitting duck just waiting for the fall _Cage the Elephant

I'm waiting for the technology to mature. You don't want to install panels with a twenty year lifetime when, if you wait five years, the new improved panels will capture more usable energy in the remaining fifteen years than the older panels could in twenty. Plus the newer panels will be cheaper, more reliable, and so on...

It may even be that capacitor storage is cheap by that point. I find this bit from Case Western interesting. I don't really snort at capacitor storage. I used to fly small models with caps. I was able to coax 30 or 40 second flights from them. Weight of the capacitor in relation to the motor and wing loading was really the limiting factor. They show buses that have run on caps. Also shown are caps in development. Based on the cost of $200/kWh, and dividing monthly use of 1000 kWh by 30, it would cost me about $6700 to store all of my peak generation using those capacitors. Given 5000 cycle life, that's more than 13 years. That would make storage cost about 1.35/day. I probably wouldn't really want to store all of it though, maybe as little as a third.

Yeah, solar's biggest problem is the fact that the peak power generation doesn't occur at peak power use for most of us.

The power demand curve starts with the morning ramp as people get up, use coffee pots, toasters, stoves, hair dryers, etc. The evening peak is when people get home from work and start the evening routine. It peaks the highest because the residential and commercial energy uses overlap. The effect of more renewables in the area is the demand curve becoming a more pronounced Duck Curve

Solar peak occurs between 10 and 1 pm in the curve. In the area of the country I work in (Southern California) the wind power is generated due to land/sea interface and peaks overnight typically, dying off during the day.

So to balance everything out is and interesting real time experiment in balancing base loads, peaks, fuel pricing, and energy pricing. The prices spike if the wind doesn't come in as forecasted or a cloud passes over a solar field. The evening peak requires a large amount of generation that can ramp up quickly.

Distributed generation works the best, like solar panels on a house, but if there is no place to store what you don't need during the day for when you get home later from work, you'll miss out on the timing of your peak use. If the power company buys your energy production it doesn't matter. You can generate during the higher demand period and let others use it if you aren't home, then buy back power at a lower rate when the peaks are over.

__________________
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm the rest of his life.